Results from Survey 1

Results:

Previously I blogged about administering my first survey to the students where they were able to use highlighters and mark their answers for how they feel about writing. The options were:

• not at all
• a little
• some
• a lot
• a whole lot

The results are as follows

I found that the majority of students who enjoyed reading, also enjoyed writing. I have often heard reading and writing go hand in hand as long as I have been teaching! In a study done by Furgerson, it was noted students awareness of print drastically increased with interactive writing. Not only did this process make her students better writers, it also increased their reading, (Button, K., Johnson, M., & Furgerson, P., 1996, p. 451).I have seen this in my students, almost the entire class is reading on a Level G/H or higher. On grade level right now is H. The highest is reading an N level....that's 8 kids!!! This survey also gave me the opportunity to see not many students enjoy writing at home.

Question:

Maybe this means most students only see writing as a "chore" or something to do as "work"..this response has been a common theme when talking to students. I wonder if this impacts their writing. What if students could see writing as a leisure activity...

You see post-it notes to the side...these are the things students

said they enjoyed writing about in their free time. Notice the post it that says, "I like to color"...this comes from the student

who could not stand to write- my "Tea Cup puppy" girl. :) She

couldn't think of ONE thing she liked to write about when we

did this survey. My boys LOVE to write about wrestling. Some students (who also only write at school) said they like to write about weather.

From this survey I gathered the majority of the students do have positive thoughts about writing. One question asked:

Writing is fun...students responded:

25% said not at all

6% a little

19% some

0 % a lot

50% a whole lot

I feel this survey is going to be beneficial when I write my findings!

Button, K., Johnson, M., Furgerson, P. (1996). Interactive writing in a primary classroom. The Reading Teacher, 49(6).

Writing Samples

Writing Samples

Part of my data I have been collecting throughout the study are writing samples. I have collected them at least once a week and sometimes spontaneously throughout. If I saw something great from a student, I would save it for later use. I have been super proud of the work and also used the sample writing to help lead me in my lessons to come. According to McCarrier, A., Pinnell, G. & Fountas, I., (2000), "interactive writing provides powerful demonstrations of writing that help young children make progress in their own writing." (p. xvi) I believe this now more than ever. Through the interactive writing process students have transferred their knowledge gained in interactive writing to their independent writing. The following example shows the students underlining the conjunctions used to turn simple sentences into compound sentences. I used the interactive writing time to tie in the language arts lessons, conventions, and how to pick topics to write about. I feel the 30 minutes used twice a week have been truly beneficial.

When I look at this writing peice I notice the student using their capital letter sto emphasize emotion and voice in his writing. He did a phenomenal job with listening to the sounds in words and putting them in his writing. He is a student who knows all 500 of the Dolche sight words which helps is reading and writing quite a bit.

The following pictures are after we read a story as a whole group, I told them to go back to their seats and write. Some students chose to illustrate and others didn't. I feel like if they took the time to illsutrate they were really taking ownership of their work. These are the peices you will notice the highlighted conjunctions.

 

Thick Description #2

Writing has always been difficult for the majority of my students. One student in particular loathed writing. She is an African American girl who is very lively and most of the time eager to learn. She comes from a household of a working mother and is very proud of her daughter and happy with her progress.

In the morning the known procedure is to unpack your things, go to breakfast if you want, then begin writing in their writing journal. At the beginning of the writing journals students would write their 3 words and yell, "I have three sentences!"  As I reviewed my field notes from a prior date, I found this particular student taking their time unpacking..slowly putting things in their cubby, looking at the breakfast cards, talking with friends/teachers that entered the room. When she sat down, the announcements came on, she smirked and put her notebook away. It was like she felt she was "off the hook" per say.

Recently, I asked students to take a peice of paper out. They all put their names on their paper and they looked at me. I explained to students they had 15 minutes to write- they could choose the topic. I immediately looked this this student to see her reaction. To my surprise, she started writing with no visible signs of discouragement. She was writing without talking or taking her eye off of it. When she was done she smiled and was super proud.

 

This student was able to share her paper with other people in the building and I could tell she felt so happy with herself. From that point on- writing has been easier for this student. She comes in and starts writing. She will ask, "is it freewrite or are we writing what you want?"- - It is sooo nice instead of her dreading writing!

Final Interview

Questions

I gave students a blank piece of paper and had them answer the following questions:

• What is interactive writing?
• How do you feel about interactive writing?
• What have you learned from interactive writing?
• How do you feel about writing?

Findings

When students were asked questions about what interactive writing was, I found a lot of different answers. Some students began to quickly write what interactive writing was. Others were looking around the room for hints. To help those students, I drug our easel to the middle of the room and said, "this is what we use when we are interactive writing." There were light bulbs going off around the room. Students quickly began to write. Most students said it was, "writing in a group" or "writing together". One student said, "Interactive writing is picking a title and writing about it in a group." I was happy with this answer because I have stressed the importance of finding a "topic" to write about.

When asked what students learned from interactive writing I got some of the following answers:

• We learned about question marks and periods
• I learned great stuff
• I've learned you have to use spaces
• In interactive writing I've learned about animals, school, and other things (she is referring to the topics we wrote about)

*There were also quite a few blank lines for that question in particular. One of my *favorite* responses can be seen below!

Overall, when students were asked how they feel about writing- the majority enjoyed it. This is a change from the beginning of the school year!

 

Survey Says...

Writing Survey

Results

I gave students a short survey pertaining to their interest (or lack thereof) in writing. It was very short, two questions and at the end they were asked to write a complete sentence. My RQ is: How does interactive writing effect independent writing. I felt part of independent writing I wanted to see change was their general sentence structure and ability to write a complete thought. Upon receiving the sentences I saw students writing about several differnet things.

One question asked how students felt about writing. It gave three faces, asking students to circle the way they felt. After analyzing the data, I found the following results:

As you see, 50% of students felt happy about writing, 19% felt indifferent, and 31% felt sad when they were asked to write. I feel like these numbers are significant in the fact that such a large percentage of students do, in fact, feel happy when they are asked to write.


When asked "Do you write hwen you are at home for fun? 50% of students said yes they write at home and 44% said no. I had one student who wrote in "some" and circled it because they didn't want to circle yes or no. (see below)

Sample Sentences

Below you will see some sample sentences the students wrote on their own when asked to write.

You will notice the pictures below show the students are happy when asked to write and she likes to write for fun.In he free write sentence she writes about how she loves to write about her family and feelings when she writes. He loves his mom and dad. This tells me she writes for "fun" or for "leisure" and that is probably writing comes more naturally to her, she has more practice and ENJOYS it.

Holy Moly!

For our latest Unit assessment in Literacy we dictated a sentence and had the kids write it down on their paper. We were looking for

• capital letters where appropriate,
• spacing,
• punctuation

(all the things we have naturally been practicing in our interactive writing lessons).

WELL! I just finished grading both of my classes assessments. The morning class is the class I am unable to teach interactive writing lessons to. The percentage of students who correctly did the things listed above was 47%. I then took my afternoon class and calculated the percentage that could write a correct sentence and 84% did it correctly!!! One of the students who did not get it correct missed her capitals and punctuation- she is also the student who missed 2 weeks due to the flu. I could not be happier with the results I am getting.

I have had several people (adminstration included) complimenting my class on their writing. My question is....how can I decide if it is due to interactive writing???

Survey...1!

My homeroom comes to me at the end of the day and I needed to give them the survey. So I found a great way to get them motivated! :) I let them use highlighters, just a little side note in case you are ever wondering what makes kids excited. It's the little things. I explained how important this was for my study and it was so endearing to see how much time they spent picking an answer and at times asking me to elaborate on what I was asking. With that being said, there were a few students rushing through highlighting whichever they felt like at the time.

There was one student in particular. As the year has progressed he has become a better writer in all aspects of writing. One thing he struggles with is just sitting still. It is difficult for him to sit still during an activity. As he did the survey he listened VERY carefully and wanted to pick the right answer. I loved seeing how serious he took it.

There were 16 survey questions. 15 of those were closed and one was an open question where students were asked to write (some of those were interesting!)I have not had calculated the results but have not yet had the time to actually go through and group them according to the question. I plan to do that in the next couple of days. Overall, I feel from adding up the numbers that a majority of my students are somewhat OK with writing depending on the setting and the expectations. The majority of students in my classroom have a difficult time deciding what to write about. I have noticed that as I walk around the room but it was nice to have some validity in my assumption. Even with all of the mixed feelings towards writing, half of the class said they would like more time to write at school and 63% feel they are good writers. Very interesting data so far!

sickness!

Well!! We have had a rough couple weeks in Ms. Plummer's class with sickness! If it's not the students it's me. I have been sick and unable to blog for a couple days. Last week it wasn't uncommon for 8 of my 21 babies to be out sick, some with the flu others with upper respiratory infections!! I am hoping we are all on the mend. Aside for the day to day things my students are missing, they are also missing some of the interactive writing instruction. I am hoping this doesn't put a huge damper on my data. We will keep on trucking this week and hope to get everyone back!! Now to what I did this week...

There were a couple things that struck me...
One student in particular can't stand writing. In her interview she told me there was nothing she liked about it and she really only liked to color. She clarified she only liked coloring in coloring books because she didn't really like to draw either! So it was very surprising to me to see her sit down and write her opinion piece with EASE. I was so proud of her! She normally will come to me a thousand times (exaggerated) and ask me what to write about because she doesn't have any ideas. Not this time!! I have seen such a change in my students as writers. I see my homeroom class doing much better with writing as opposed to my morning class. I don't know if I can give all the credit to the interactive writing but I do believe it plays a role!

This is one of my student's individual white board.

Friday we went to the carpet again and did some interactive writing with our easel and students had their individual boards. Students would help come up with sentences and bring their marker to the easel to write a sentence. I sat back and watched what happened. Students were saying things such as, "don't forget your capital letter!" "you need punctuation!" "does that sentence make sense?" "I think it would sound better if we wrote ______"..it was AMAZING to watch. This week I am going to set up a camera or at least get some audio of this experience. I was a proud teacher for sure.

Thick Desription...1

It’s 12:30, forty minutes until specials. This time of the afternoon is always a little hectic. Students have had lunch and are a bit squirrely. The past interactive writing lessons have gone well but I kept thinking they could be better. I read in a study done with a group of students, the teacher gave each student a white board to write independently, waiting to be called up to share their wriitng with the whole class, (Craig, S., 2006).This time, I called one student at a time to come to the carpet and get an individual white board, marker, and eraser. The look on their faces was full of excitement. They didn’t expect this for their interactive writing time. I looked around and saw all five tables with their heads down waiting for their name to be called. Students one by one got their board and sat quietly waiting for directions. I saw a girl in the front look back at another student and smile. They were very intrigued. Two students took their pen and started drawing on their white board, I had to take them away and have them sit at their seats with notebook paper and a pencil. One of the boys started to cry. The other couldn’t care less; he was spinning around in his chair. As the lesson progressed most students were writing on their board using the techniques we had talked about. One student in particular was forgetting his spaces, I was able to go to him and have him fix from that point on—it got a lot better. When time was up and it was specials time, one student refused to stop writing until she got done, I let her finish up while the rest of us lined up (pictured below). Overall very successful!

 

 

Craig, S. (2006). The effects of an adapted interactive writing intervention on kindergarten children's phonological awareness, spelling, and early reading development: A contextualized approach to instruction. Journal of Educaional Psychology, 98 (4).

Questions!

I continue to be successful with the teaching of my interactive writing. What I am lacking is finding the time to do interviews and surveys and take meaningful field notes. I have my initial survey but intended giving multiple surveys throughout the process. This next week I am going to really buckle down to achieve this. Another thing I feel I have plenty of is students' writing samples. I have been able to incorporate writing a lot more. One thing I have noticed is my afternoon class, which I am conducting the interactive writing lessons with, seems to be "out-writing" my morning class. One reason I am unable to do interactive writing lessons with my morning class is the tight schedule I have. There are reading teachers that come in and work with certain groups of students and students being pulled out for ESL and other services. I am trying to decide if I think the success is because of interactive writing or because the students in the afternoon are just, by nature, a little higher. I want to start squeezing in a little time with the morning class to incorporate some of this though!!!

I was going to observe for my "thick description" Friday but there was a variety of things that got in the way of this. I am going to look back through all of my notes I have taken and see if I have by come chance got some information I can use. If not, I will not be able to post that to my blog until Monday. I will do that ASAP.

I am nervous about everyone talking about all the data they have collected.I can't help but worry I am way behind on this. Do you guys have any suggestions? What are the different kinds of data you have? Have you started coding it? What are you coding? Sorry! tons of questions--just a small freak out moment on my part. I just want everything done right!!!

This past week went well. I was able to squeeze in two interactive writing sessions in for the week. I had intended on three, but the hour delay put us on a tighter schedule. I am very happy with how this is all fitting in with the schools expectations. They have really started coming down on our writing and students producing drafts independently. I use the interactive writing lessons to model how to think out sentences and compose ideas for writing. A lot of times students would come up to me and say, "I have three sentences!" but only have three words on their paper.

With that being said, I was very happy with the progress I have seen so far! Students are taking more time with their writing and using their writing time to be "authors", like we have discussed. The writing sample I collected on Friday showed me some next steps for my lessons. Some students need work with spacing. I have noticed in his independent writing he spaces his letters instead of whole words. One student started writing in the middle of the page instead of starting at the correct spot on their paper. These things can easily be fixed during our writing time together, I can't wait to see if it transfers.

I look forward to more writing lessons and independent writing!

Take One!

Last week I was feeling slightly overwhelmed and not so sure of the inquiry I had chosen!! I am happy to report this week I am feeling MUCH better! With the snow day Friday, I was unable to get the pictures I had taken to upload. I taught my first few interactive writing lessons last week. With my hectic schedule I am lucky to get two or three lessons in each week.


First Lesson:

We had just finished working on our informative writing pieces as a class and needed something to write about for our first interactive writing lesson. The day before our cafeteria gave us star fruit as a snack but we didn't have time to eat them so we decided to save them. The next day, the starfruit was missing. I told the kids, lets write about it!! Williams, C. & Lundstrom, R. (2007) stated, "Interactive writing is an approach to beginning writing instruction in which a teacher and group of children co-construct an oral message and then 'share the pen' to get that message into print." (p. 205) Using that information on interactive writing, we collectively wrote our piece together. They are always concerned with what to write. If there is free write they often times sit and stare. Interactive writing is a great way to show kids how to explore different topics to write about!!
*******************************************

Students were SO excited to "share the pen"!! Below you will find pictures of our process. It was an excellent way to differentiate instruction because I knew which students needed what skill.

Our Finished product!!

 

Once we finished, students went back to their seats to finish the prompt. I collected this as a writing sample to compare future writing.

 

 

Williams, C. & Lundstrom, R. (2007). Strategy instruction during word study and interactive writing activities. The Reading Teacher, 61 (3).

Shew!

Well! I have made an attempt to put my research project into full swing! I have managed to send home the permission slips but have yet to get them all turned back into me. I plan to send them home one more time and possibly get it translated for my Spanish speaking students. I wanted to start implementing my interactive writing lessons Tuesday but got delayed! I had an observer in the classroom and I had to continue my previous ways of teaching. I have gathered my first sample writing. I have to admit there were some instances where I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw and others not so much! I don't have much to share just yet, but am excited!

I plan to teach interactive writing lessons for the next two days this week and should have some more information to share this weekend.

Here we go!

Shew!

I have spent this week trying to get organized and ready to start this action research! One thing I have always been working on is organization!! I am still getting my binder ready with dividers, folders, and anything else I will need for this to run smoothly! I am definitely looking forward to conducting this research in my classroom and finding out how it will turn out. I plan to blog at least twice a week to keep you posted on the interactive writing instruction as well as the writing students compose at the end of each week!

Timeline

So far, I have sent the consent forms home with students and intend on waiting the rest of the week to see what I have as far as numbers. I am currently trying to figure out how to get a calendar imported onto my blog!
Until then my timeline is very sketched out. I intend to blog twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays. My schedule permits me to teach writing two to three times a week. I will teach my interactive writing lessons on Tuesday- Thursday. Fridays I will collect a writing sample from each student. Friday, February 1st, I will collect my first sample for data collection. Each week I will interview students. As students are participating in our lessons I will write down my observations to analyze later. I will also observe students as they write on a weekly basis.


****TO BE CONTINUED****

 

Context/Problem

I teach in the Spanish immersion program and have two classes I am responsible for teaching writing to. I decided to send home a permission slip with both classes to be on the safe side. Along with that I made a check list so I can be sure to flag students who will not be able to participate. In both classes I have noticed they have trouble writing independently. When I am teaching whole group students can tell me what is needed for example: punctuation, capital letters, etc. but when it is time for them to write on their own they struggle transferring their knowledge without my guidance. I am hoping interactive writing will help make writing instruction more meaningful.

I chose to concentrate on my homeroom class. The reason behind this is because I have a little extra time in my schedule to squeeze in some interactive writing. My morning class is jammed pack with small group literacy and individualized instruction. In my homeroom class there are 21 students. Of those students there are 8 African American, 6 White, and 7 Hispanic students. Parents are very involved with the students in both of my immersion classrooms.

PROBLEM: I want to motivate my students as they write individually. Once students go to their seats it's like they forget how to write and have no desire to do their best. I want them to take pride in their writing and try their best. I plan to use interactive writing to show students the various things they can write about as well as the conventions of writing. I hope to put it all together in fun lessons that engage students to learn about writing. Once students are invovled on the carpet, I want them to take what they learned and put it into their independent writing.